If you don't like the conclusions of a piece of research what do you do? You can criticise its methods, point out its limitations, attack the people who did it or expose the vested interests of their funders.

Or if you really don't like it you can spuriously link it with racists and denounce it as "pointless".

That was the disappointing and offensive argument offered by lifestyle columnist Zoe Williams' critique of a study on whether the visual system of women is skewed to seeing pink.

She wrote:

When are at least the decent universities - like, for instance, Newcastle - going to introduce some kind of cost-benefit analysis into their research programmes? How much will this knowledge benefit humanity, and at what cost to our academic credibility? I only ask because it seems to be taking such a long time...[what] is the point of proving that women prefer pink for biological reasons?

My aim here is not to defend the research per se. It wasn't a brilliant piece of science - read Ben Goldacre for a more detailed critique. But we should vigorously resist the notion of Ms Williams' and others that certain pieces of knowledge are off-limits and should not be known.

Let's say for the sake of argument that the perceptual system of women is different from men. That could be extremely important for people designing visual displays or emergency signs, for example. The knowledge itself is not at fault, rather the way it is used.

Scientists work best when they are given free range to pursue interesting ideas. Sure, some are more interesting than others, but occasionally even the most unexpected of discoveries leads to a fantastically useful application.

Ms Williams' objects to the speculation by the researchers that the perceptual differences stem from the foraging habits of our ancestors. But this is no more than a plausible suggestion that forms a minor part of the paper. It is journalists who have magnified this part of the story.

We in the media are often guilty of trivialising science by jumping on fluffy stories - it is August - and so perhaps giving our readers the impression that these are what occupy scientists day to day. At the same time the worthy, but less reader-grabbing, grind of humdrum science never hits the headlines.

That's bad enough without comment writers kicking the boot into a journalistic straw man of what science is and demanding that it be censored.